Natural Language Processing

Menu Based Natural Language Interfaces-Kyle Neumeier

Natural Language Problem

How does the computer know what we mean?

Natural Language Problem

• Seems easy at first

• Language seems to follow a systematic structure

called grammar

Natural Language Problem

• Language gets difficult quickly

• Ambiguity

– Structural

• Book me a flight on Friday

– Semantic (meaning)

• That bat scares me

– Lexical (part of speech)

• The stolen painting was found by the tree

– Referential

• Bob hid the keys to Jim's car because he had too much to drink

Subproblems in NLP

• Machine Translation

• Text Summarization

• Entity Recognition

• Temporal Event

Recognition

• Text generation

• Natural Language

Interface

• Speech Recognition

• Text to speech

Outcomes of NLP

• Sound understanding of formal grammars

– Computer languages & compilers

• Keyword and phrase based searching

• Neural Networks

• Ontologies

• Speech applications

Natural Language Interfaces

• Problem with traditional NLIs– Habitability Problem

NaturalLanguageInterface

Menu Based Natural Language Interfaces

• MBNLI– Predictive menu to guide user to correct sentence– Solves Habitability Problem

• LingoLogic– Architecture– Grammars– Translations

• Applications of MBNLI– Database querying– Agent control

Menu Based Natural Language Interfaces

Predictive Parser

Front End

GrammarTarget System

Dynamic Composition of Menu Based Interfaces

• Everything is Alive– Ubiquitous computing– Soft controller

• Grammar modules– “Plug-in”– Function reuse

• Grammars must scale

Predictive Parser

Grammar

Grammar Grammar Grammar

Grammar Grammar

Database Queries

• SQL is a difficult to learn– List orders where the order total is greater than $ 200.00– SELECT * FROM orders WHERE total > 200.00;